Red felt the weight of Lizzy's gaze on him almost as tangibly as he could feel her fingers laced through his own as they made their way from his front room to his bedroom.

It wasn't an especially long trek to his room, but she held his hand the whole way, even up the relatively cramped flight of stairs where it surely would've been easier to let him go. She didn't seem to want to let him go.

There was a metaphor in there somewhere, but Red didn't have the wherewithal to contemplate it at the moment. He was too caught up in the rather unlikely sudden turn of events to do so properly.

Lizzy's attention was equal parts welcome and unnerving. Red wasn't sure what she was looking for, exactly. He doubted he had changed all that much since she left.

He did know she sometimes had a difficult time hiding her fascination with him. He understood that. He'd been there plenty of times himself, especially where she was concerned. But the way she was looking at him tonight, like she thought he might disappear at any moment if she looked away, well… It was odd, considering she'd been actively trying to make him disappear for a while now.

Was this regret, perhaps? Had the prospect of hastening his demise finally lost some of its appeal? Red couldn't say.

"Penny for your thoughts?" he prompted.

Lizzy shrugged. "I guess I was thinking about the last time I held your hand, that day in the back of my mother's car."

"And here I was thinking I hallucinated that."

A little furrow appeared between her brows. "You thought you hallucinated holding my hand?"

"Yes. Though I guess the fact that my head was in her lap while it happened should've tipped me off that it wasn't a fantasy."

"What, if it was your fantasy, it would've been my lap?"

Red raised an eyebrow.

"Is that a surprise?" he asked; she looked away, almost embarrassed. "I figured my mind must've been playing cruel tricks on me, tormenting me with something that I… so desperately wanted at my lowest point, only to snatch it away later with cold, hard reality. You haven't been particularly cozy with me since that day, so that only reinforced my assumption that it hadn't happened."

He held up their hands. "This feels almost as unreal tonight, if I'm honest."

It was true—Red had always relegated the idea of being with Lizzy this way more towards the realm of fantasy than reality, something he romanticized in his more fanciful moments ever since he entered her life and she had met him with such a fierce, challenging, breathtaking determination.

He imagined wooing her properly—offering her stability and support and a shoulder to cry on, spoiling her with fine foods and chocolates and wine, courting her like she deserved, like Tom Keen never could. He wanted to show her what it could be like to have a man truly treasure her, just as she was. When they made love for the first time, it would be something special, something gentle and slow and sweet, not full of fear or anger or stress. Creativity in the bedroom could come later, but Lizzy inspired Red's hopeless, sappy romantic side that he'd hidden somewhere deep down inside him, and he longed to match the expectations that went along with it.

None of that had been possible, of course. The closest they'd ever come had been music and drinks and some small scraps of cobbled-together comfort during the most existentially terrifying moment in Lizzy's life.

Red couldn't build forever on something fraught like that. He couldn't build forever with a target on his back, and he'd done everything in his power to make sure the target on Lizzy's back disappeared—and to make sure no one ever even thought to try to paint one on Agnes. It was the best he could do at the time given the circumstances, though he wished he could've done more.

More.

Maybe Red could've done more, but hindsight made things obvious that were easy to miss while caught up in the chaos. It wasn't as if he could go back and change anything. He would never know if the wall she had built between them back then would've been as impenetrable if he hadn't started building one first. He'd never know if they could've avoided this… fracture… between them. He could only regret the things they hadn't tried.

There were moments more recently that made Red feel like Lizzy might've been hinting around that she would be receptive to more overt overtures from him, but he hardly believed it. And he couldn't afford to risk his heart when the possibility that he had misinterpreted her wishes was so strong. Their most recent falling out had made it seem as if his caution had paid off.

Until tonight, that is. Tonight was what happened when there was nowhere left to run or dodge or hide. They'd fought this moment for so long, but there was nothing more to fight.

Tonight, an unstoppable force met an immovable object. (Good luck figuring out which of them was which.)

Tonight, Lizzy pushed Red up against the wall at the top of the stairs and took his mouth again, deep and insistent and very difficult to misinterpret.

"Does that feel real?" she asked, staring at his lips like she wanted to devour him whole.

"Not in the slightest," he said, framing her face with his hands. He drank in her expression as it shifted from bravado to concern.

"Red…" she whispered.

"It's not my illness this time, if that's what you're worried about. I am fully aware of myself, my actions, and my surroundings. However…" He took a breath and it caught in his chest. "I still feel like I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. I still feel like you can't possibly be here with any goal but to kill me."

"What if tonight all I want from you is you? Would that be so bad?"

Red leaned in, slow and halting, and Lizzy tried to close the distance, but his hands on her face prevented it. "Promise me something."

"What?"

"Promise me you'll remember this moment. What it felt like. How you felt."

Lizzy's cheeks flushed under his hands. "Of course I'll remember. There's no reason for me to forget."

After a moment, Red nodded and then he kissed her, and she melted into the kiss, exhaling through her nose against his cheek, her arms quickly snaking around his neck. He backed her across the narrow hall, bracing himself with one forearm against the wall while they continued to kiss. Lizzy ran her hands over his body, everywhere and anywhere she could reach, encouraging him to touch her in return. She grasped his ass, pulling him against her, and he groaned, tearing his lips away from hers.

"The top of the stairs probably isn't the best place for this," he said.

"Right. Yeah. Let's go."

Lizzy shoved herself off the wall and tugged Red along with her. She barely waited for the bedroom door to close before she was on him again. She wasn't gentle, but he didn't want gentle. Not this time. Too much had happened to start at gentle.

The past few years had felt like an endless, harrowing race between them, but tonight felt more like a negotiation. Or a renegotiation. It wasn't particularly romantic. It wasn't his fantasy. (Or at least not that one.) They'd done far too much to each other for it to be anything as carefree as that anymore.

Lizzy's teeth nipped at Red's skin, her fingernails scratched and scraped, her hands roamed with little regard for how rough or eager she was being. Like she was chasing something, chasing him. She was going to extract something from him tonight—if not the whole truth, then something like it all the same. Somewhere deep down, she did still desperately want to know him, to possess him, through any means necessary. And through her fevered pursuit of victory, of pleasure, of pain, she had finally caught him.

Was any of this healthy? No. But quite frankly, Red couldn't remember a time he was more turned on than he was at that very moment. Lizzy's kisses left him breathless—the way she let his bottom lip drag between her teeth let loose a coiling, rising heat in his body that wouldn't fade. As if being pinned against a wall wasn't enough, Lizzy had already caught on to another of his greatest weakness in the bedroom: make him ache and he'd be putty in your hands.

"How do you want to do this?" he asked, his voice rough and foreign even to his own ears.

"What do you mean?"

"Exactly what I said. How do you want to do this? There are many highly appealing options. I'm open to... most things."

"Most things?" Lizzy said slowly, befuddled by arousal or a genuine confusion, he couldn't say.

Red led her to his dresser and opened the top drawer, moving aside a few stacks of handkerchiefs so he could pull a box forward from the back. He set the box on top of the dresser and stepped out of the way so she could open it.

She flipped open the lid and her eyes widened a bit. "I guess I shouldn't be surprised you have a better collection than I do. These are all for you?"

"I've been known to share on occasion. But yes."

"Adventurous."

"Eh." He shrugged. "The way I figure it, the human body is capable of feeling pleasure in a wide variety of ways, so why should we squander that potential by sticking to the straight and narrow?"

Red came to stand close behind Lizzy.

"You said you wanted to fuck me…" he whispered, his lips brushing against the shell of her ear; she didn't quite manage to stifle the shiver that ran through her body. "I want you to know I'm perfectly willing for that to mean anything you want it to."

Lizzy turned her head to meet Red's eyes over her shoulder. Maybe she hadn't meant what she said quite like this. But she didn't seem averse to it, just surprised. She ran her fingers over the array of toys and Red's heart sped up in anticipation when she came to a stop on his favorite.

"Strip," she said in a straightforward tone as she spun around to face him.

"All at once, or…?"

"No." She slipped her jacket from her shoulders and tossed it aside. "An even trade. A jacket for a jacket. A shirt for a shirt."

"And everything in between?"

"We'll iron out the details as we go." She drew the backs of her knuckles down the center of his chest and then twisted the top button of his vest out of its button hole. "Vest for hoodie," she said, before unzipping said hoodie, all the while watching as he worked the rest of his vest buttons loose.

Unbuckling his belt, he pulled it free, careful to slip it from his leather holster so he could set his gun down, and then he took off his watch, too, adding it to the growing collection on the dresser, before he opened his trousers enough to easily tug his shirttails out.

Lizzy reached out and took his tie by the knot, tugged him a little closer, close enough for their noses to brush, and then used her other hand to pull the other end of the tie free, undoing the knot. She left the tie loose around his neck, ran her hands down his shirt, slow and meandering, until she found the bottom button and began working her way back up, undoing them as she went.

Red closed the distance between them and she let him, parting her lips and taking him in, allowing his exploration of her mouth to continue only until she finished with his shirt. She pulled back with a gasp to admire her handiwork.

Red couldn't look away while she studied his body, couldn't help but stare at her kiss-swollen lips, the hunger in her eyes, the aroused flush to her skin. She placed her hands flat in the middle of his chest and slid them up over his pecks under the unbuttoned shirt, spreading her fingers through his chest hair. She brushed a thumb over one of his nipples and his cock twitched in his open trousers, his excitement all the more obvious with them barely clinging to his hips.

Suddenly, Lizzy took hold of the sides of his unbuttoned shirt and his undone tie, and pulled him in for another kiss; she walked him back until his legs hit the bed frame and then gave him a firm shove, causing him sit almost reflexively.

She looked him up and down, lazy and deliberate, taking in the picture he made—breathing heavily, half-undone, and very, very aroused.

"What next?" he asked.

She took hold of him under the chin, angling his face so he couldn't look anywhere but directly back at her.

"I think I want to have you at my mercy. I think… I think I always feel like I'm at yours."

"I don't—"

"I know. I know you don't mean to make me feel that way. Sometimes good intentions aren't enough," she said.

Red felt a pang in his chest that he had to fight the urge to soothe physically. "I understand."

Satisfied, she gave his jaw a quick, affectionate squeeze and said, "Tell me if I go too far."